Do Slums Promote High Fertility? Neighborhood Differences in Fertility in Accra, Ghana

John R. Weeks, San Diego State UniversityAllan G. Hill, Harvard UniversityArthur Getis, San Diego State UniversitySarah Hinton, San Diego State University

Fertility in Ghana is still well above replacement level. Even in the capital city of Accra women are having nearly three children each, and the declines there, as in the rest of the country, seem to have stalled. The average for Accra, however, hides a great deal of variability within the city. Explaining that spatial variability is the goal of this paper. We test the hypothesis that slum characteristics of neighborhoods account for fertility variability within Accra, net of individual characteristics. We do this by using data from a ten percent sample of anonymized individual records from the 2000 census. We group enumeration areas into contiguous slum areas by applying a new spatial clustering technique called AMOEBA. We then evaluate the importance of slum neighborhoods as predictors of fertility at the individual level using logistic regression analysis, and at the neighborhood level using spatially filtered multiple regression analysis.

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